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Back when I did my “Favorite Albums by Artists Who Have Never Been Nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame” series, I knew going in that I would forget a few. The biggest oversight by far was Lonnie Mack’s The Wham of that Memphis Man! which should have been the very first album on the list. I’ll whap myself up side the head later. For now, let me take the occasion of his passing to make partial amends.

Recorded in 1963, released in 1964, that particular album brought Mack a whiff of short-term fame, via a couple of instrumentals (including a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Memphis”) that rode the Pop charts. It also bought him a lifetime of respect, as in, “if he never did anything else, he’d still be a legend.”

Of course he did a lot more, before and after, including gather up Merle Travis and T-Bone Walker and Les Paul into one glorious style that influenced virtually anyone you’ve ever heard of who has picked up a guitar since.

One thing he did that was almost alone among white boy guitar gods of any era, and absolutely unique among the handful (Scotty Moore, Paul Burlison, James Burton, Duane Eddy, Link Wray, Dick Dale, et al) who set the early style for hard rock long before the British Invasion, was sing on a level with the great black blues players. Actually, he sang on a level that would have made him a legend if he had been born with ten thumbs. With cultural giants falling like autumn leaves, I’ll just say that no death leaves a bigger hole in the purely musical Cosmos than his.

As another prophet once said. “Turn those speakers up full blast and play it all night long!”

North of fifty, it’s exceedingly rare to find myself listening to anything “new” with the old addictive spirit of youth. This week it happened twice.

The month’s entertainment budget went to acquiring a couple of 1969 releases by one-hit wonders from the fifties, one of which I’d been chasing for thirty-plus years, the other I just heard about a few weeks ago.

Wouldn’t you know they link up, there in the shadows–though not as obviously as I might have suspected if I was into suspecting things.

After “Susie Q” (circa 1957) Dale Hawkins released a string of follow-ups that–after the manner of the insanely competitive times–didn’t go anywhere. His original guitarist, James Burton (all of fifteen when he played “Susie Q”’s classic riff) soon hooked up with Ricky Nelson on his way to Merle Haggard, Elvis and a career’s worth of legend-building session work. Hawkins went behind the scenes (promotion, production, the usual) and knocked around the music industry for most of the new decade, waiting, as it turned out, for his sound to come back in style.

By the late sixties, it had.

Creedence kicked off their staggering run of mind-blowing singles with a revival of Hawkins’ hit. A sub-genre called “swamp rock,” which in theory was updated rockabilly, but in practice reached as far as Joe South and Vegas-era Elvis, was soon in full swing. That–plus his decade’s worth of contacts in the Music Biz–was no doubt why Hawkins was able to convince somebody to let him make an album, called L.A., Memphis and Tyler, Texas, after the three cities he recorded it in.

I never heard about it until a few weeks ago when Kim Morgan wrote about one of its tracks here. Having lived with it a bit now, I can’t say I’m as taken with Dale’s version of “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” as she is, but it’s certainly interesting and I’m grateful for her take in any case because it led me to the rest of this. Hawkins wasn’t the greatest singer in the world, but he was committed. His was one of those voices rock and roll had let through the gate and it’s to his credit that, after a decade spent wandering around inside the castle walls, he had not reached a point of taking anything for granted.

You can hear the peak of the result here (I’m pretty sure ZZ Top got their entire career out of the opening riff), but the whole album’s a grabber:

Wilbert Harrison’s path was more than a little similar to Hawkins’. He was a bit older and he was hard-core R&B where Hawkins was hard-core rockabilly, which meant he had a place to go when he, too, failed to follow up an epic hit (“Kansas City”) with any chart success at all. He was able to make a living on the one-nighter-in-the-local-bucket-of-blood trail that is always available to anybody with a hit in their shady past who is willing to stick with it. Eventually he turned himself into a one-man band–presumably to cut expenses–and his persistence finally paid off in a chance to make an album with New York record man Juggy Murray, one of those independent hustler/promoter types who Dale Hawkins might have become with only the smallest twist of the Fate Dial.

I got onto the resulting album, Let’s Work Together, the way I suspect a lot of people did–in the “Treasure Island” portion of Greil Marcus’ Stranded, first published in 1979. There are albums on that list I still haven’t heard but every once in a while, no matter how broke I am, I get in a certain “Hey thirty-four years is long enough and it’s cheap on Amazon” kind of mood. I figured it would make a nice double bill with Hawkins and it does.

But they run in opposite directions.

While Hawkins’ LP is a clear (and successful) attempt to update his basic ethos–to move forward–Harrison went back beyond the beginning.

I don’t know what exactly possessed him to reach back behind the hard-driving, urban R&B that had once made him famous (however briefly) and drop an album-length field holler–complete with a version of Fats Domino’s segregation-era “Blue Monday” that sounds both ancient and prescient, as though Jim Crow had never really ended (ancient) and never really would (prescient)–into the Age of Aquarius.

Maybe it was just good old artistic integrity. It’s sure hard to believe anybody meant to sell records that way in 1969.

But sell records he did.

Despite (I don’t think there was any “because”) a vocal which utterly belies the optimism of its presumed message, the title track became one of the most unlikely hits (#32 on the Hot 100) of the entire revolution and, in its full album version (see below), it, along with the rest of the album, proved one of history’s oldest lessons.

If you want to look forward, look back.

“Let’s Work Together” is the furthest thing from slick imaginable. It makes even Dale Hawkins sound like Mel Torme. Heck, it makes the Wilbert Harrison of “Kansas City” sound like Mel Torme. But, in 1969 and now, it served/serves as a nice reminder that the basics upon which the disco-fied, hip-hopping future would be built went back much further than James Brown, or Fats Domino, or, for that matter, Jim Crow.

And, no matter how well I think I’ve learned these lessons, it’s always nice to be reminded by something that has a good beat to it even if I can’t dance a lick.